


Yourself With a Different Hat

by Basic_instinct40



Series: If I Live Too Long I'm Afraid I'll Die [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst and Humor, Bottom Bucky Barnes, Bucky said Steve could hug himself, Dom Steve Rogers, Gallows Humor, Identity Issues, M/M, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Top Steve Rogers, Your boyfriend has some problems, mentions of body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-03 06:01:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24010018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Basic_instinct40/pseuds/Basic_instinct40
Summary: Bucky doesn’t raise his voice to be heard. “Hey, Steve?” he asks.Steve stops mid-tirade and claws in the air, “What is it?” he snaps.“What the fuck is going on?”Alt Summary: Did you ever see two old men have a fight about the state of their relationship?
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: If I Live Too Long I'm Afraid I'll Die [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1731574
Comments: 13
Kudos: 98





	Yourself With a Different Hat

**Author's Note:**

> The house seems to circle around you slowly. I circle around you, a wild animal near a fire. I remember that I would kill for you. I remind myself that it wont be necessary. --Not mine

The drive back home is silent and uneventful. Bucky tries to make conversation, a half-hearted attempt to apologize that he dresses up poorly as a joke. Steve meets Bucky’s nervous laugh with a shaking index finger at the tip of Bucky’s nose. 

“No,” Steve snaps at him when they come to a stoplight. He doesn’t bother to look at Bucky when he says it. They both knew who the disobedient dog was. “I’m not going to fight with you in a car when you already hate being in one enough as it is.” Steve shakes his head at the road. “So, no.” 

Bucky bites his lip to hold back the words he wants to fling at Steve’s face. He wanted to be cruel and ask Steve if he thought he deserved a medal, or a hand job, just because he wasn’t inflicting emotional pain on Bucky. Steve was forever lecturing about the fairness of life, without considering the fact that life itself wasn’t concerned about being fair. There were no scales to balance or secret karma police, but Steve was not the type of person to give up on those ideals. Bucky bites his lip and stares out the window in silence. 

A sigh from Steve draws Bucky from his worried thoughts and he turns to see him pushing Bucky’s phone towards him. “Here,” Steve says, handing it over. “I made sure I charged it, although you didn’t have to leave it at home,” Bucky stares ahead at the road along with Steve. They both squint their eyes in an effort to block the setting sun. “Relax and listen to your music. It’s a long drive home.” 

“Thanks,” he tries to say while powering on the phone. He couldn’t say for sure why he left his phone, knowing that when Steve discovered the note, he would be furious by that alone. He could chalk it all up to minor rebellion or the urge to leave the house untethered, but neither would be correct. When Bucky woke up this morning he had already decided to go to Sam’s house, everything that followed after had been on a whim. 

Steve rolls the windows down halfway without having to be asked, and Bucky searches through his playlist until he finds the song he wanted. The music drifted over the car trying its best to smother the tension between the two men. Everyone assumed that he and Steve only wanted to hear music from their past as a shoddy attempt to reclaim so-called golden years. 

But, as Steve liked to remind Bucky in private, he’d grown up half-deaf and most music back then sounded the same to him. Any music Bucky was shown from their past made him feel like he was taking a test that he already knew he would fail. Modern music was better for them both, with its smoothed over voices and no forgotten strings attached to tie to its notes. 

Bucky closes his eyes, doing what Steve told him and relaxes, feeling drained from the day’s events. During the car ride he feels the warmth of Steve’s hand, his fingers dig into the dark blue material of Bucky’s jeans. This wasn’t Steve saying everything was okay between them, but it wasn’t Steve saying everything was all wrong, either. He feels the familiar twists and turns of their neighborhood and far too soon, Steve was pulling into their driveway. Bucky wishes they could stretch this moment out with his music playing into the night and Steve’s hand on his knee, but unfortunately the moment is cut along with the engine. 

===============================================

He finds Steve still with his jacket on, standing in front of the fridge. The faint glow from the fridge is the only source of light currently in their house and it illuminates Steve’s worn down face, reminding Bucky of a train flattened penny. The sight of him adrift in the darkness of the kitchen rattles forth an image from the depths of Bucky that leaves a taste of pencil shavings and sour fish in his throat. Steve in front of him is both big and small. Both handler and a mission. A miniature version of the expanded duplicate frowning at Bucky now. 

“Buck, you feeling okay?” Steve asks him. He was holding a bottle of pomegranate juice, with the fridge door still open. 

The start of a headache was forming on the left side of Bucky’s temple, and the unexpected summoning of memories made his words sharp when he spoke. “Why are you standing in the dark and letting all the cool air out of the fridge?” He walks over to flip on the switch bringing them both into the light. 

Steve doesn't speak, moving instead to the dishrack and grabbing two glasses. He pours the black-purple liquid until it reaches midway for both and hands one glass to Bucky, who takes it in silence. He takes a drink while Steve’s eyes roam everywhere that wasn’t Bucky’s face. Steve didn’t take a drink out of his own glass, and with anyone else this would have annoyed Bucky, but he knew that Steve needed something to do with his hands, especially if they were going to talk seriously. Bucky opens his mouth to speak, but Steve interrupts, asking if he wanted dinner. 

“No,” he says, shaking brown locks into his eyes. 

“Are you sure?” Steve asks, pointing to a large brown ceramic bowl on the kitchen counter. In it sat four not-quite-ripe tomatoes and two overly-ripe avocados. “I think the avocados are about to go bad.” He still hasn’t looked at Bucky, but he gives the fruit a considerable once over with confused blue eyes. 

Bucky looks at the avocados suspiciously, not sure when or who bought the green lumpy fruit. “Uh, yeah. Not hungry,” He repeats. 

Steve sits his untouched juice down on the counter and clears the ten feet over to the avocados. He picks one up, pressing on it with pads of his fingers.“Well maybe you ate too much sugar over at Sam’s house and that’s why you aren’t feeling well.” Steve puts down the first one and picks up the second, continuing the odd palpitations. 

Bucky watches Steve fondle the produce, only aware after nearly sixty seconds that he hasn’t blinked, made frozen by Steve’s irritating actions. He blinks several times and turns away, draining the reminder of his juice. The weight of the glass is nice in his hands and Bucky uses it to anchor himself to this body. He faces Steve again, who has thankfully put the avocados down. 

“I’ve never said I wasn’t feeling well,” Bucky says. “And I’m not hungry because I’m not hungry.” 

“You can’t possibly think eating cookies all day is--,” Steve’s voice rises. 

Bucky doesn’t raise his voice to be heard. “Hey, Steve?” he asks. 

Steve stops mid-tirade and claws in the air, “What is it?” he snaps. 

“What the fuck is going on?”

Bucky’s question doesn’t drive Steve further into hysterics, instead it seems to calm him, as if Bucky’s emotions were now ripe enough for Steve to take in. Steve’s eyes go to aqua green cabinets to the left of Bucky’s head, where they keep the tupperware and one of Bucky’s guns. “Do you want to talk about what’s bothering you, Buck or do you want to keep up the dramatics?” Bucky can tell that he is trying to keep the tenor of his voice calm. It pisses him off more. 

“You think today was all about you and then you call me dramatic?” Bucky says with a sneer. “Unbelievable.” 

“Yes, you. Dramatic.” Steve stomps back over to his drink, snatching it up fast enough that some of it spills onto the wood floor. “Leaving a note while I was in the shower saying that you were going out.” Steve makes air quotes with his gigantic fingers around the word out. “You took our only vehicle and then left your phone,” Steve yells, each word yanking Bucky up by his spine. “Not to mention the way you’ve been at my throat this past week.”  
“I would call the stunt you pulled today not only dramatic, but reckless and selfish. Do you have any idea how I felt? How goddamn worried-” Steve’s eyes were wild and his mouth clamped shut. He downs his juice in one go, furiously gulping the drink like it could put out the fire blazing inside of him. 

Bucky knows that this would be the best time to walk away, if there would ever be one. Cooler heads would prevail, or at the very least keep their heads. Especially when a jacked up super soldier was screaming at you, but neither of them was one to back down in a fight. Better to go out on a blaze of glory while in a fist fight, then choke to death on pomegranate juice.

“You want to finish that sentence, Rogers?” he asks. “You seem to be hitting your stride and I was enjoying that vein that bulges out in your neck.” 

Steve wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, his lips the color of ripe beets. “I’m not going to get backed into a corner of your shit, Bucky. You got something to say, come out and say it.”

Bucky gives Steve a ruthless grin that could make lesser men wet themselves. “I’ve been more than clear. It’s you that can’t pull your head out of your ass.” He sits his glass down on the stove. “We can do the same song and dance, but if you want to cut to the chase, sweetheart,”-- Steve laughs meanly at the pet name, but Bucky continues. “You want me to make choices that you deem fit, you want me to have all the say until it’s something you don’t like.”

Steve’s head shakes the entire time Bucky speaks, his eyes burning with indignation. The closest neighbor was less than five miles away, and Bucky was thankful for privacy. Two emotionally damaged super soldiers screaming at each other about the complexities of their relationship wasn’t something you wanted the locals to overhear. 

“This is a pretty piss-poor apology,” Steve tells him. They stand off from each other, juice drunk and avocados forgotten. “Try again.” 

“Fuck off, Steve,” Bucky runs his hand through his hair and it comes away damp with sweat. He lets out a displeased groan, knowing that in the state he is in, his face is red with anger. “You don’t get an apology for being a dick.” He throws his arm in the air. “Don’t ask questions and get mad when you don’t like the answers.” 

Steve looks at the cabinets to the left of Bucky and then down at the floor. He does this, twice in a row before he answers. “Bucky, the things you say don’t make sense to me.” He looks down at the floor, then back at the cabinets. “You call yourself a thing, something to be--,” Steve won’t look at Bucky as he repeats his own words back to him. “Something to be owned and I don’t understand that.” He shuffles to the fridge, opening it and then closing it again, but not before turning back to face Bucky. “I can’t own you.” 

“Well, you can’t have your dead friend back either, Steve.” Bucky didn’t need to stare down their kitchen appliances to say this to him. “I’ve told you already that he died in a Hydra Bunker,” He ignores the way Steve flinches. “You wanted to know what happened to me, to understand me.” Bucky shoves his fingers into his chest, right above where his heart should lay. 

He remembers one of the first Hydra bunkers he overthrew sometime after Hydra had fallen and Bucky was on his own. It was one where they kept him back in the 80s. He and the asset killed everyone there and burned the facility to the ground, but before the site went up in flames, Bucky found pictures of himself. The body was naked, strapped down to a table and cut open. Bucky could see his heart. The most important thing, he remembered telling himself, is to remember that the body isn’t you. Horrible things happened to the body, but he was not the body. He was not the body, he was not the dead boy. Bucky had sat alone in the ruined bunker, telling this to himself, for hours until he could walk again. Then he blew the place to pieces, pictures included. 

Bucky closes his eyes, putting the pictures, and the places they had stored him, away. He opens his eyes, watching Steve, who is not quite watching him. “When you begged me to tell you everything, I assumed you meant me, the person you’ve been living with for almost a year.” 

Steve sighs, slouching over to pick up a small green watering can that sat near their coffee maker and fills it with water from the sink. They kept several plants in the house, a good few in the kitchen, none that could be killed by two people that might get called away on a long mission. Steve sets about watering them, moving past Bucky to the windowsill where the Chinese Evergreen and English Ivy were potted. 

“Bucky,” Steve says more to the plants. “I’m trying.” 

Bucky tugs at his hair and counts backwards from thirty. “Yeah, I am too.” He watches Steve move over to the large spider plant that sat near the back porch window. “Don’t over water that one, Steve,” he says, voice stern. 

“I know,” Steve says. 

“Sure. Okay,” he watches Steve over water the plant. 

Steve finishes his rounds and places the watering can back in its spot. “I don’t know what you want me to do? I want us to work out.” Bucky hears the honesty in his voice, he can hear it mixed in with the sadness. Bucky doesn’t want to hurt Steve, but he understands needing to be honest even if it hurts him. 

“Stop waiting on the dead boy to come back, stop waiting for me to reveal that this,” He tugs at the face. “Is some elaborate mask and that this--,” he waves with the left arm to the empty space on his right. “Is going to magically grow back.” Bucky smiles but he makes sure that it’s one of his smiles, not a borrowed one. “Your super sperm has its limits.” 

Steve rolls his eyes towards the ceiling. “Jesus Fucking Christ,” He see-saws his hands through the air. “I don’t give a damn about your arm!” Steve’s eyes ping pong from Bucky’s missing limb to the floor. “None of what you’re saying has any merit.” 

“Alright,” Bucky spreads his arm out. “Tell me then. How do you think this ends?”

For such an enormous man, Steve still has the mannerisms of someone who isn’t used to taking up space. Bucky’s eyes pin him down, cataloging each half-finished movement Steve makes as he works to answer. He crosses and uncrosses his forearms, scratches his nose, hair, and back of his neck. He finally responds, head hanging and voice low. “I want you to end up happy Buck, and I want you.”

Bucky chest heaves at Steve’s reply. The answer, he is sure, is meant to be sweet. It’s meant to make Bucky’s insides melt, warm, soft, and gooey. Something easier for Steve to mold back into its former shape. Bucky’s laugh is harsh and goes on far too long. Steve doesn’t get the joke until he does, but by then it’s too late. He stands up straighter, an old knee jerk reaction from when he was smaller, never one to forget how to react under ridicule. 

Steve is careful with his words. “I don’t get what’s funny?” 

Bucky cuts off his laugh with a sharp slap of his hand on the counter. “You’re funny,” He lets Steve know. “You want me to be happy?” he spits out the word happy as if it’s something filthy Steve tried to force down his throat. “And you want poor Bucky back?” He takes one step towards Steve. 

Bucky doesn’t move to close the gap between him and Steve, afraid of the way the body is reacting. He is furious. Not the Asset who had no use for it, or the dead boy who Steve can’t seem to let go no matter what he says otherwise. No, this Bucky is furious and he can’t say what that means for anyone, but it’s nothing good. It’s nothing sweet or easy. 

“How delusional are you?” Bucky asks him. “What version of the story are you living that makes you think one of us will end up happy?”

Steve is looking at him now. 

Bucky’s headache is on both sides now, but the pain is welcoming. It’s a focus away from Steve, and his piercing gaze. “There is no use or room for happiness in lives like ours,” Bucky tells him. “You’re too old to try to sell that shit to me or yourself.” He tilts his head at Steve, considering the man and space he now takes up. Bucky notices that his eyes are wet with unshed tears, making them a deeper blue than normal. 

Steve sniffs, his nose red and wet. “I know you think you have nothing in common with the first Bucky, but you can sure be an asshole like he was,” he looks Bucky in the eye while he speaks. Tears hang in long bottom lashes, but they’ve yet to fall.  
Bucky decides to make his exit, knowing enough is enough when one of them cries. Before he leaves he hugs Steve, who gives his own wet, stiff hug back. He leans in, kissing Steve’s forehead, feeling every bit an elderly man. Steve’s still crying when Bucky presses his lips to him. It isn’t the first time they’ve kissed, nor the first time they’ve kissed while Steve cried, but it’s their first kiss since they started fighting more than a week ago and Bucky’s missed him. Steve kisses back without heat, but he kisses back all the same. 

“This is going to be the only time you’ll ever hear me say this.” Bucky looks at the floor while he talks, but he keeps his fingers pressed against Steve’s brachial artery along his bicep. He matches his pulse to the same rhythm. “So listen, okay?” he doesn’t glance up to check if Steve is paying attention. 

“I’m listening,” Steve’s voice sounds like it’s coming from the bottom of a well. 

“I’m not saying that the Bucky who came before me didn’t care about you, but his capacity for selflessly loving another person was pretty slim.” Bucky stares down at the hardwood floor that’s murder on his knees, and wonders about the last time either one of them mopped. Steve’s back goes rigid, but Bucky focuses on his headache and how he’s going to mop the kitchen in the morning. 

“Meaning?” Steve asks. 

Bucky will have to check that they have floor cleaner before he goes to bed. “Meaning you should be glad I’m yours.” Bucky stops examining the floor and tilts his head to meet Steve’s eyes. “I love you as much as something like me can love a person.” He kisses Steve’s wet chin hard enough to force them both to feel it. “I’m going to take a bath.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Tori for the beta read and for the title of the fic. She is over a thoughtsappear if you want to check out her writing. It isn't Steve x Bucky, but it's still amazing. I haven't been able to find the source for the quote at the beginning so if someone knows please tell me. I will continue to search.


End file.
